RUSH: Lisa, Leawood, Kansas, outside Kansas City. It’s great to have you on the program. Welcome.
CALLER: Thank you. It’s an extreme honor to talk to you, Rush. I just had one thing. I’ve been listening to you for quite a long time, and it just really drives me crazy when the mainstream press — and, you know, I don’t give them very much credit because I know where they’re coming from, but their constant attacks on you and the message that you deliver just drive me crazy.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. I’m sure it does irritate a lot of people.
CALLER: Well, they attack anybody who has a conservative viewpoint, frankly, or doesn’t share their viewpoint. A lot of times you can’t even talk to somebody who’s for all of this socialist agenda. The reason I called is you were talking about the people wanting to move our country more towards a socialist country, and to me, I think, in my head, I’m starting to call these people un-American, because our country is not a socialist country.
RUSH: Exactly right.
CALLER: We’re not a European socialist country and if they want to start implementing all these programs here then that’s not America, and you can’t call those people Americans and you can’t call our country America any of them because that does not agree.
RUSH: I understand how you feel, Lisa. I totally understand how you feel. These people are mere stewards, they are not elected to remake, re-form, or reshape the Constitution or our government or our country but they’ve taken it upon themselves to do it. Since she mentioned all these media attacks, folks, look when there’s smoke, there’s Rush. That’s really the new phrase here: Where there’s smoke there’s Rush. The reason they attack me and the reason I’m honored by the enemies I have, is they need villains. Their ideas don’t sell themselves. They need demons, they need villains, and they always tell us who they fear. They always tell us who they are most afraid of. So let’s go to the audio sound bites. Jonathan Karl, ABC’s World News last night.
KARL: The health care debate isn’t over, and neither is the vitriol.
RUSH ARCHIVE: We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town.
RUSH: Vitriol. It’s vitriol to suggest we need to defeat Democrats. Vitriol. You see, here’s the Today Show today, Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell reporting on me.
O’DONNELL: Hateful words aimed at Democratic lawmakers.
RUSH ARCHIVE: And greetings to you, ladies and gentlemen.
O’DONNELL: The provocative platform Rush Limbaugh commands can add fuel to the fire!
RUSH ARCHIVE: We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town.
RUSH: Kelly O’Donnell, America is standing up and cheering when they hear those words. Fuel to the fire? See, whenever one or two idiots — and in this case we don’t even know that it happened. When one or two idiots are accused of doing something, the media is constantly trolling for people that listen to talk radio when some crime happens or whatever. The people, Ms. O’Donnell, in this country are livid, not because of me. The people of this country are not filled with vitriol because of me. They are filled with vitriol because of Barack Obama and people like you who will not tell them the truth about what’s going on. The people of this country are in vitriol and in anger, and they’re taking it out on you by not watching your pathetic little network or your pathetic little show, because you’re not honest, because you are propagandist. You have no more interest in ‘speaking truth to power’ than you do in having your ratings increase. You have forgotten who your audience is. Your audience is not Matt Lauer and Chris Matthews. Your audience is the American people, and you’ve lost ’em, and that’s why they’re angry. You’re not doing your job. I am doing mine. They looove me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now all of a sudden I’m the most dangerous man in America. How can that be? If I lost, how can I be such a threat anymore? Dianne Feinstein has joined the TIME Magazine chorus, ‘Come on, Republicans, just quit, just give it up, why are you continuing this fight?’ Oh, I get it, you guys can struggle for a hundred years to destroy the country and then you can celebrate when you get a next chunk of it passed, and we’re supposed to just give up. Is that how it works? That’s what they’re trying to tell us.
Greetings, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Telephone number, 800-282-2882. E-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
When some nut, when some loco weed walks into a place and shoots it up, the media look for any evidence that they’ve read conservative books, they’re members of the tea party, or that they listen to talk radio. They’re said to be racist because one person allegedly says something or because of some sign. In this kind of reporting it only cuts one way. Have you noticed? In fact, they even lie. What was the incident that happened recently? Was it the guy who flew his plane into the IRS office down in Texas? He was a registered Democrat, right? Something like that, and they tried to tie him to the tea parties and everything. Or the Alabama doctor, oh, yeah, these guys are all tea party members. No, they’re Democrats. They got Democrats killing themselves, literally committing suicide rather than have their homes foreclosed on them during the Obama administration.
‘TARP Watchdog Slams Obama Foreclosure Program.’ This is CNNmoney.com. ‘President Obama’s foreclosure prevention program will likely fall far short of its goal and may even do more harm than good.’ I think we’ve been saying that for a year because government cannot save things like this. Government can’t keep you in your home when you’re doing nothing to keep yourself in your home. They just can’t do it. And now people are committing suicide in Philadelphia, ahead of being foreclosed on. Now, if George Bush were president, that’s all we’d be hearing, Bush is killing people, people dying, people killing themselves because of Bush, or any other Republican. Well, how about this? How about this angle? Every person who is abused by government bureaucrats or who is denied government benefits or who the government has supposedly failed, those people don’t get any attention whatsoever. How about the sympathy of a person denied something from an insurance company? Oh, we hear about that all the time, all the time.
Single mothers are now the most virtuous people in our country, particularly if they have children named Marcelas. Oh, yeah. I, of course El Rushbo am the most dangerous man in the country now. Oh, yeah, we’re to believe that government runs smoothly, it runs efficiently, we’re led to believe it means well and it’s therefore always good. On the other hand the private sector is full of rich, hateful, greedy people who create nothing and steal from others. Yeah. And that’s where Rush Limbaugh happens to live, is in the private sector, so I’m evil, I’m greedy, I’m rich, I take and steal from others, I don’t produce anything. I am the enemy to these people.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, the assaults on your host in the media continued into yesterday afternoon and last night. Let’s go to MSNBC Live, the anchor is the pathetic David Shuster.
SHUSTER: Right now it’s Rush Limbaugh today once again railing against Democrats, demonizing President Obama, and it may be working. According to a new Harris poll, 67% of Republicans think the president is a socialist, 57% of Republicans think he’s Muslim, 45% don’t think he was born in this country, 38% of Republicans think President Obama is, quote, ‘doing what Hitler did,’ and yet this: 24% say the president of the United States is the anti-Christ. Does Rush Limbaugh speak for the GOP? Republicans must be getting some of this garbage from somewhere. Who are they getting it from?
RUSH: Well, I don’t know. (laughing) Anti-Christ and Muslim, I don’t know where they’re getting that because that’s not a part of the program. I haven’t really made that one of our topics here, but the methodology of this Harris poll was greatly flawed. I didn’t even report the poll yesterday. I knew these guys would be touting it. I didn’t report it. Other pollsters are raising a big stink about the methodology of this thing, but it achieved its purpose. I told you on Monday: This all going to happen now. We’re going to be the biggest evil enemy in the history of the country now. Now, as far as this Hitler business, one of the first things the National Socialist Party did was try to nationalize health care. I mean, facts are facts: The president is a socialist. The number ought to be much higher than 67%. And we got the New York Times saying so today. We’ve got what’s-her-face, Sebelius, saying so today. We got John Dingell: ‘Control the people.’ Worse than socialist. Well, Shuster was mentioning all that to one of his guests, a guy by the name of Mark Levine, who is an attorney (not Mark ‘Le-vin,’ Mark ‘Le-veen’) and Shuster said, ‘Why is it fair to pin this on Limbaugh?’
LEVINE: If you heard Rush Limbaugh today, he specifically compared Barack Obama to Hitler. (sic) This is not rhetoric that’s coming out of nowhere. People understand the tea party activists are drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama. They’re doing it for a reason. There are a lot of mostly angry, white, Southern, male, fundamentalist Christians who are very angry.
SHUSTER. Oh.
LEVINE: They see their power being taken away, they see blacks in power, they see a woman Speaker of the House, they see a gay man as head of the Financial Services Committee, and they’re worried. The irony is this bill will actually help most of the people, they just don’t know it.
RUSH: A blooming idiot, a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance. Somebody help me: Did we even mention Adolf Hitler yesterday? It’s a total lie. Adolf Hitler was not mentioned on this program yesterday. We didn’t even talk about any of these Hitler videos yesterday, right? The word ‘Hitler’ was not uttered on this program. And here comes the cliche: ‘Mostly angry, white, Southern, male, fundamentalist Christians. Very angry, see their power being taken away.’ This is what passes for learned analysis. Do these guys get together after the show and do a circle you-know-what, ever? Or are they doing that underneath the desk during the show? What a bunch of blooming idiots, and this guy is an attorney, and it says here he has a radio show of his own? That’s probably the problem. Nobody listens to it and he’s ticked off about that. Anyway, it continued. We move on to sound bite number 11. ‘Maude’ Behar. And, by the way, let’s do sound bite number ten. I get a lot of people asking me, this is a interesting question because of generations, ‘Where do you get ‘Maude’ Behar? Where does the ‘Maude’ come from?’ Remember the TV show?
DONNY HATHAWAY (playing ‘Maude’ TV show theme music): Lady Godiva was a freedom rider; she didn’t care if the whole world looked. Joan of Arc with the Lord to guide her; she was a sister who really cooked. Isadora was the first bra-burner, and you’re glad she showed up.
CHORUS: Ohhhh yeah!
DONNY HATHAWAY: And when the country was falling apart, Betsy Ross got it all sewed up.
CHORUS: And then there’s Maude!
DONNY HATHAWAY: And then there’s Maude.
CHORUS: And then there’s Maude!
DONNY HATHAWAY: And then there’s Maude.
CHORUS: And then there’s Maude!
DONNY HATHAWAY: And then there’s Maaaude.
CHORUS: And then theeeeeere’s…
DONNY HATHAWAY: That uncompromisin’, enterprisin’, anything-but tranquilizin’!
ALL: Right on, Maude!
RUSH: It stared Bea Arthur. Maude was a spun-off character from All in the Family, somehow was always berating Archie Bunker on the show. So, you know, Bea Arthur, ‘Maude’ Behar. Anyway, this morning on The View, ‘Maude’ Behar said this about me…
‘MAUDE’ BEHAR: There’s a difference between hate speech and free speech, but hate speech is also protected in the first amendment. But you have to take the hit. If you are a hateful speaker like Rush Limbaugh, people are going to go after you.
RUSH: (chuckles) You know, there is nobody that listens to this program that thinks that there’s any hate. There’s nothing but love and affection and optimism, good cheer and happiness on this program, which I bet ‘Maude’ hasn’t listened to in I don’t know how long. Anyway, to the phones. That’s just a sample, ladies and gentlemen. (interruption) Yeah, she’s still on CNN, but Headline News. It’s Headline News, which has more ratings than CNN does, but the Cartoon Network still has more numbers than MSNBC, CNN, and Headline News combined in the cable universe. More people are watching cartoons than are watching those three networks, which are indistinguishable, by the way, which one is the cartoon and which one’s the Cartoon Network.
BREAK TRANSCIRPT
RUSH: And we are back. A couple more sound bites here of ‘hate speech’ aimed at me from MSNBC yesterday. This is David Shuster again with Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University. Now, remember, what they’re doing here. You see it happening with the Ann Coulter situation up in Canada. That’s possibly our future. They don’t have free speech up there. If the people in charge don’t like what you’re saying, they can keep you from saying it, and what they’re trying to do is criminalize now all criticism of Obama as ‘hate speech,’ as being racist or worse. It’s exactly what they’re doing to Coulter. So yesterday or Monday afternoon, here is David Shuster. He said, ‘Limbaugh then turned to the politics of race,’ and he played a clip of me saying: ‘Here’s what he’s going to say: There are some people who don’t like your skin color, who don’t think you should be American.
‘He’s come to divide; he’s come to conquer. Is there anybody who now doubts what I meant when I said, ‘I hope he fails?” And then Shuster says, ‘What goes through your mind, Mr. Dyson when you her that stuff?’ Of course what I was talking about there was the coming immigration bill: Amnesty. And no question, Obama’s going to run around and — I’ll say it again — he’s going to say (doing impression), ‘There’s some people that don’t like your skin color, who don’t think you should be an American.’ Obama has divided us. We’re not unified. There’s no unity here, not that we were promised. We got no post-partisanship, we got no post-racial presidency. In fact, I actually call him a post-constitutional president! He’s a post-constitutional president. And I think something else needs to happen. We need to have at the Smithsonian Institute a wax figure, life-sized wax figure of an insurance salesman and of a drug company researcher, ’cause pretty soon aren’t going to be any of them. So anyway, here’s what Michael Eric Dyson said to my supposedly ‘divisive, racist’ comment.
DYSON: If anybody is fomenting dissent, it is Rush Limbaugh. The politics of division, the cruel denial of the utter humanity of Mr. Obama. Those who disagree with him have the right to do so. But to disparage his character and to assert these unfounded, uh, ideas and propositions about Mr. ‘bama is just, uh, dumbfounding to me. There’s nothing in Mr. Obama’s demeanor — uh, uh — a reaching out to the right, uh, to suggest that he’s in any way, uh, inclined to make this an Empire of Color or trying to derail what he sees as the benefit for all Americans of social policies that he puts into legislation.
RUSH: Whatever the hell that means. I never said that’s attempting to make an ’empire of color.’ I said he’s going to try to pass amnesty by shutting down criticism of it, by claiming that the people who oppose it are racists! I know exactly what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, ‘There’s some people who don’t like your skin color, who don’t think you should be an American. They don’t.’ Now, that’s clear for what it is. It’s talking about immigration. In fact, it’s already been said at numerous pro-amnesty rallies that have been held. I mean, I’m not making that up. It’s really not that great a prediction because it’s been said by other people. So then Shuster spoke with Michael Eric Dyson again. ‘Here’s what else Rush Limbaugh said today in terms of describing the Obama crowd,’ and he played the clip of me saying, ‘They look at this country as one big criminal act, one big civil rights, human rights violation. Don’t doubt me.
‘That is how Obama has been raised to look at this country, and he believes it,’ and Shuster then turns to Dyson and says, ‘Well, that’s about as loaded as it gets.’ What is it about the truth that bothers these people? There’s no question that this is what animates Obama. Everything he’s touching he’s destroying. Do you think this is accidental? He says he’s going to save the home market. What’s happening to it? People are committing suicide in Philadelphia, in advance of being foreclosed. New home sales, all-time record low! Despite all the shovel-ready jobs that we’re going to have, construction unemployment is 27.1%. He was gonna keep unemployment at 8%. It’s now hovering around 10% generally, 16% if you counts those who have given up looking. Nothing he’s doing is working. Everything he’s touching he is destroying and changing, and where is this ‘laser-like focus on jobs,’ anyway, we were told we were going to get last December? So here’s Dyson’s reaction to it all.
DYSON: That’s ignorant beyond belief. We don’t have to demonize each other to disagree. Mr., uh, Limbaugh again is fomenting these politics of opposition and I think the conservatives of good conscience should speak out against him to resort to this kind of shenanigan(s) where Mr. Limbaugh is trying to foment racist animus against Mr. Obama is just remarkably… Rush Limbaugh is trying to foment a universe of bigotocracy (sic), that has no place in American civil discourse and it only foments the kind of dissent that leads to the most attacks on Mr. Obama, the most threats against him of any president (sic) —
SHUSTER: Right!
DYSON: — and I think we need to be afraid for the future of our nation, not simply for the health of Mr. Obama.
SHUSTER: Right!
RUSH: Well, we agree on that. I mean, we are afraid for the future of the nation, but because of Mr. Obama. By the way, the Secret Service says he is not getting more death threats than any other president has, Mr. Dyson, Professor Dyson — and besides that, your side, Mr. Dyson, did a couple of books and movies on how to assassinate George W. Bush and your media told us these were serious literary works. We had to at least treat them that way. I mean, I have not seen anything like that about Obama. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley, you have a question? What? (interruption) Bigotocracy? Well, that’s a new word. He’s a professor, he can make up words. ‘Bigotocracy.’ I make up my own words, feminazi, so he can make up ‘bigotocracy,’ if he wants to. But there’s no racist comment here. Mr. Dyson looks at this country as one big criminal act! Mr. Dyson looks at this country as one giant violation of civil rights. Mr. Dyson looks at this country this way. That’s why he’s so angry all the time. What do you think he’s teaching in his classroom? The greatness of the Founding Fathers? Ha-ha! Anybody want to lay odds on that? What’s happening here is that they are trying to criminalize all criticism to Obama as hate speech from racists or worse, just like they’re doing with Coulter.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, it really is interesting. CNN, MessNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, how many hours have they spent discussing you, or minutes, on the day when their wonderful president had that big F-ing deal signed? Wouldn’t you think they’d be in party mode out there? I mean they got their big F-ing deal signed and they should be partying hardy out there. You would think they’d be celebrating, finding people are having Christmas dinners, you’d think they’d be out there finding all these new people who are having Christmas in March with all their new health care coverage. Instead they spend precious broadcast minutes trashing me, lying about me. Why is that, do you think? Why is that? Because they’re liberals, they attack truth-tellers. Liberalism is a lie. It’s built on lies. They attack and demonize people who expose the lies. (kissing sound) That simple.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I don’t even think it’s genuine. I think all this was strategized. I don’t think anybody spat on Cleaver; I don’t think anybody called Barney Frank the F-word; I don’t think anybody called John Lewis the N-word. There’s no evidence of it other than them. And now the Brits are going through Louise Slaughter’s office bill — well, that’s obviously happening, we’ve seen the pictures, and the brother of some Virginia congressman has had his gas line cut. So now up on the MSNBC, breaking news: ‘Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, Democrats targeted after health care reform vote.’ I told you this at the beginning of the show. I’m sorry to sound hysterical here, but at the beginning of the show, ‘They’re going to criminalize all this, and they’re going to try to segregate every critic of this health care bill as somebody throwing bricks or threatening lives or what have you,’ which is not the case.
These people simply know they’re facing a majority opposition here, and this is how tyranny happens, this is how statists act, run to the media, whine and cry. I have yet to call a press conference, all the death threats that I’ve got. I refuse. I have not called a press conference to describe all the security steps I’ve had to take because of all the meanies that are out there who are threatening me. We could do it every day. But it’s the league we play in, and these guys are in the big leagues, too. (crying) ‘People are criticizing us. (crying) And they’re attacking us with words.’ (crying) And we gotta shut ’em down.